


forever

by venndaai



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, POV Chloe, Sacrifice Arcadia Bay Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 07:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9113479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: the morning after the storm.





	

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this a while ago, after episode six came out.

You drive through town, the morning after, and it’s like driving through another world. The air sparkles. Everything has been washed clean, and deer frolic in the ruins like a fucking disney movie. Main Street is empty, what’s left of it. The National Guard finished evacuating survivors around dawn, the bodies of the dead have all been moved, and no looters have arrived yet to pick through the flotsam.

Max seems calm, staring blindly out the truck window. Her fingers have been tight on your sleeve for the past fifteen minutes, like she’s reassuring herself that you’re still here. That you’re both still here.

You keep driving, past the miraculously preserved “Welcome to Arcadia Bay!” sign, into the dense Oregon forest, onto the highway, and she doesn’t say a word, but her arm slides to pillow her head against the window and she turns her gaze on you, just gazing like she could look at you forever.

“We could keep driving,” you say. Your voice is hoarse from last night, shouting your mother’s name as the two of you shifted rubble and pulled aside boards. 

She looks at you, and she doesn’t mention that it would be cruel to let the world think the two of you dead, doesn’t remind you that neither of you have any money, doesn’t tell you why you’re being willfully idiotic. She says, “Yeah. That sounds good.”

“Let’s go to LA,” you say. 

She smiles. It’s like the sun right in your face, such overwhelming heat and brilliance. “Yeah,” she says again.

You tell yourself you won’t always feel this way about her. There will be days when you’ll scream at her, or run from her, days when you’ll feel like nothing matters, not even love. You know that from experience. But it doesn’t seem real, when she’s smiling at you. The world would have been better with you dead, but she chose this universe, where you are alive, and so you’ll live for her. Forever, you told her at the lighthouse, and that still feels like truth. The world has been scoured and made new by forces beyond your comprehension and all that you know is that you love Max Caulfield. This skinny hipster in a white shirt stained gray by the rain. There’s a delicate bruise on her cheek and you don’t know how it got there.

“Goodbye Arcadia Bay,” you say, and then you have to pull over so you can hunch over the wheel and sob, but her hand rests between your shoulder blades and when you stop crying she is still there, and it feels like the greatest miracle of your sad brief existence. You could drive to LA, you realize, you could sleep tonight curled up with her in the back of the truck and you could wake up tomorrow morning and kiss her, and the morning after that, an entire lifetime of possibilities opened up in dazzling radiance, the only gift you have to give her, your only payment for your survival.

Her hand curls around your neck and you close your eyes and think about eternity.


End file.
